Here is another good one, this time courtesy of PayPal:

technorati: paypal, shouldreallygetbettercustomersupport

Created 203 weeks, 2 days ago

One of the datacenters that my new python web hosting company (Webfactional) uses had several days of downtime due to an explosion!

This evening at 4:55pm CDT in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room. Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.

As I don't have anything mission critical hosted with them (yet), and because no one was injured, I was more impressed with the thought of an electrical gear explosion knocking down walls than I was worried about having some services offline.

Unfortunately it took them days to get back online because of some faulty backup, backup generators that were delivered to the site. These are exactly the kind of situations that I am hoping to avoid by moving to a Google/Amazon hosted service. If something blows up in Plano, another server in Sealand or Brazil or in low Earth orbit will pick up the load and my services will keep rollin'.

I remember when I was a sys-admin back in the day using very early slackware for ISP user and web hosting. We experienced an emergency offsite datacenter power outage from an electrical storm. Unsynced disc arrays of Linux file systems dying with meek little screams provided me weeks of system restoration overtime pay .

Back in those days you could explain to your customers that your company experienced a physical event that left them without service or revenue. Hell, I think I remember insurance policies and uptime guarantees that weren't 99.99%.

So close your eyes for a sec and imagine that explosion that knocked down three walls! I bet the surveillance footage is awesome.



Created 205 weeks, 6 days ago

I just finished working on a video repository site. I will post more on it later, but if you want to see it in action, checkout http://video.viewmastr.com/.

The repository supports per-user disk quotas and will soon support a flash file uploader. I will release some of the source code soon as well.



Created 222 weeks, 7 hours ago

I bought an album through Amazon MP3 and I am very happy with the quality and experience of buying digital music through Amazon. I particularly like that the store is web-based and the downloader (osx and win) integrates seamlessly with Windows Media and  iTunes (iTunes runs my home wireless audio network).

Amazon MP3 complements the other non-DRM stores such as Walmart.com mp3, Digital-Tunes and eMusic. Sometimes, you can also find digital music directly from the labels (usually indy) such as Bleep.

Individual songs at Amazon MP3 are between 89 and 99 cents each with whole albums given a large percentage discount over buying individual tracks.

The songs I bought were CD-quality VBR (~275 kbps : Heavy Metal) and encoded with LAME 3.97 Joint Stereo and included album art in the id3 tags.

The best part about this is how comprehensive the library is. Gratz' Amazon. As long as music I want is available at your store I will be shopping with you. Now, how do I determine if the songs are watermarked or not .

If Walmart.com mp3 and Amazon can woo even more of the music publishers from Apple, maybe Apple will either switch to mp3 or sell all music in the DRM-free AAC format and license AAC decoding for free.

technorati: amazon, mp3, music, store

Created 242 weeks, 9 hours ago

I didn't realize that Gravatar.com was down for upgrades until I had read it on a forum I moderate. The service continues to serve the existing registered-user icons but the entire new user registration and account settings pages seem to be down.

A little research turned up that MyBlogLog and whooiz.com might have some kind of JavaScript solution that I will look into over the week.

The security and moderation behind Gravatar.com was the best thing about it. I might have my own solution for avatars and dasBlog soon enough. Stay tuned!

technorati: gravatar, mybloglog, whooiz, avatars, dasblog

Created 278 weeks, 3 hours ago

Hey YouTube... errr. Google! The 'Forgot Username' functionality has an problem. I got a nice little e-mail from your system this morning that reads:

YouTube™ – Broadcast Yourself

The following YouTube username is attached to this email address: . We hope this helps.

Thanks for using YouTube!

— The YouTube Team

To change or cancel your email notifications, go to your email options

Copyright © 2006 YouTube, Inc.

Seems like someone thought my email address was the one they used when they signed up with YouTube. I even got 4 copies of it. They were really convinced this was their e-mail address.

I love a good mystery, so I looked a little deeper. Was this Spam? Was this a phishing attempt? Nope, just a good ol' fashion hole. The kind that most web applications these days cover in day-1 of design requirements.

The functionality YouTube uses to send a reminder e-mail for a forgotten username just sends e-mail to whatever address is entered into the form field. If they have a username for it they just append it to the message.

And if they don't have an username on file, that's where the problem is. They don't suppress the message. They still send it... ugh. And with a fancy little blank area where the username is supposed to be. That is useful. And kinda rude.

1,650,000,000 dollars and it comes with holes. Oh, and if you received an e-mail from YouTube and you are a friend of mine, it was probably because I was testing the system.


technorati: YouTube, Google, exploit, problem


Created 292 weeks, 1 day ago

My RSS reader is my new Intertube browser. Some days I might spend all day consuming my feeds and never visit the sites on the other end.

With that said, here are some things I can't get via RSS yet (without some fancy HTML to RSS conversion tool, which might compromise the security of some of these items).


Content I would like to have access to:

---

• My Pop3 email (I started working on this)
• Seats that just opened up (cancellation, etc) at hard-to-reserve restaurants in San Francisco [probably through OpenTable]
  
• Changes in my stock portfolio realtime
  
• My bank account and credit card recent credits and debits
• Changes to my aggregated credit report
• Voice mail left on my phones

Features I would like:

---

• The ability to detect if a linked resource in a post I am reading is available via its own RSS feed. This way I could stay inside my RSS reader, it could pull in the content of the link (if it is available via RSS) and would let me stay inside my RSS reader.
• Advanced RSS exploring. The RSS reader could determine the publishing engine of the feed to take advantage of things such as retrieving the entire history of an RSS feed, detecting Comments RSS and other such items.

---

Of course, almost all of these require some level of security. But with https and the like, it shouldn't be too hard to create this stuff.

If these exist, please let me know.  Thanks.


Created 298 weeks, 6 days ago

I love GUI Gallery. I was browsing the old Packard Bell interfaces when I happened upon this screenshot of the Packard Bell Navigator 3.9 (circa 1996). I remember when a friend of mine bought one of these $3,000 Packard Bell machines back in 1993 and it had so many features and micro applications that he was overwhelmed and never figured out how to use the thing.

I will admit that it was hell navigating through these virtual rooms to launch your applications. Did I leave Lotus 1.2.3 in the Study with the Candlestick, or maybe in the Gameroom with Sarge? This metaphor for virtual rooms was used far too often back in those days.

Reminiscing on these interfaces I laughed when I came across this screen with one of the virtual rooms called "Myspace". And I love the description that goes with it:

"Myspace is the place for older kids to hang out and use all the great features and programs available on your Packard Bell computer."



After spending some time on MySpace.com today, I think they should change thier slogan to: "Myspace.com is the place for older kids to hang out and use all the animated gifs, obnoxious background songs and tacky graphics available on the internet tubes."

technorati: myspace, funny, packardbell
del.icio.us: myspace, funny, packardbell

Created 299 weeks, 6 days ago

Life has been busy. And I don't just mean regular busy, I mean that seat of your pants planning every-waking-hour busy. And, what do I have to show for it? Hours of catch-up sleep and a busted finger (from a football game last week). This weekend I am trying to maximize the quality of my down-time (I don't even feel like I can call it free time since I could probably find something to work on). I am sitting on my back patio (thanks Brad!) and the wireless is working, the tempature is ~ 65 degrees and I have just created another masterpiece drink (1 part Makers Mark whiskey, 1 part Red Apple Schapps, and 2 Parts sour mix, shaken, served on the rocks).

This week my friend Lee launched his blog http://www.ioyu.com. I am glad he finally did that. He has so much to contribute to the net and he is always so busy that maybe this will be his foray into his brain setting up shop and providing intelligent quips at incredible prices.

So, its off to see Starchild tonight or a movie. On another note, I just got my invite to Google Pages and have done a preliminary write up on it [coming soon]. I am thinking about how this product fits in with the purchase of Writely and what uneifarous plots they are planning. They give you 100MB of file storage by the way. Pretty slick. If only they wouldn't use your google gmail name in the URL of they googlepages site they create for you (invitespam).

Oh, and don't worry if your dog eats cat litter, unless it is the entire pan, it will probably survive. Unless it is that new crystal stuff then I might call the vet right away.

Created 320 weeks, 4 days ago

Either it was robot blocked from google or they just created the site. The point is, they have a Web site. Also, the address was updated in google maps and mapquest. I put in the request only a few weeks ago. Looks like the mapping sites are turning around the requests faster than they used to.

Feel Medusa Web Site

Created 329 weeks, 4 days ago